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Active Directory data in email signatures

When deploying email signatures for multiple users from a central place, you need a way to easily include these users’ personal information like names, titles, departments, addresses, etc. in the signatures. This is achieved using placeholders integrated with a central directory that stores users’ personal details (e.g. Active Directory), and including the placeholders in signature templates.

Both Microsoft Exchange Server’s and Office 365’s built-in email signature management solutions do exactly that, i.e. download data from Active Directory (or Office 365 user directory) into the signature based on who is the sender of the given email.

Unfortunately, Exchange and Office 365 do not support all AD user account attributes. But I think that the ones that they do support, are enough to convey the most important details.

Here is the full list of attributes supported by Exchange’s and Office 365’s email signature management solutions. I divided them into sections that correspond with tabs in the Active Directory Users and Computers object Properties window. In the right column I’ve put the Active Directory Domain Services names of attributes (use them when deploying the signature template via a VBS script).

Returns the common name (cn) of the object definedin the manager AD DS attribute

Attribute Editor*

CustomAttribute1-15

AD DS: extensionAttribute1 through extensionAttribute15

Note: Some Active Directory attributes (e.g. otherTelephone, otherHomePhone, otherFacsimileTelephoneNumber and postOfficeBox) support multiple values. In the case where more than 1 value is provided, the output will include all values separated by semicolons.

More Active Directory data in email signatures

To be able to include more Active Directory data (than just the attributes listed above) in your centrally managed Exchange signature use CodeTwo Exchange Rules. Other benefits of CodeTwo Exchange Rules are: